Eugène Fredrik Jansson (18 March 1862, Stockholm – 15 June 1915, Skara) was
a Swedish painter known for his night-time land- and cityscapes dominated by
shades of blue. Towards the end of his life, from about 1904, he mainly
painted male nudes. The earlier of these phases has caused him to sometimes be
referred to as blåmålaren, "the blue-painter".

Jansson's parents belonged to a social stratum straddling the working and
the lower middle class, but they were interested in art and music and
ambitious for their two sons, Eugène and his younger brother Adrian. Eugène
went to the German School in Stockholm and took piano lessons. An attack of
scarlet fever at the age of fourteen caused him health issues from which he
suffered for the rest of his life, including bad eyesight and hearing and
chronic kidney problems.

Jansson enrolled in the Tekniska skolan (now Konstfack) and studied with
Edvard Perséus, a painter who ran a private art school in Stockholm. He was
accepted into the Antique school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1881,
but did not have the means to follow most of his contemporaries to Paris for
further studies. Remaining in Stockholm, which supplied him most of his
motifs, his first trip outside the Nordic countries would come in 1900, when
he had already become well-established as a painter and his economic situation
had started to improve. In his youth, he assisted Perséus in his portrait
production and painted some still lifes, but he eventually found his favourite
motifs in the city surrounding him.

He lived his whole life together with his mother and brother at Södermalm,
the southern part of Stockholm. They eventually settled in a flat at No.
40 Bastugatan, on a height with a view over most of central Stockholm
including the Riddarfjärden bay and the Old town. Most of his paintings from
the 1890s up to 1904 are night views over Riddarfjärden, as he would have seen
it from his home, or street views from various parts of Södermalm. They are
dominated by shades of blue and very visible brush strokes, often crossing one
another. Over the years his paintings moved towards increasing simplification
and abstraction, and at the end of his "blue" period, little more than the
street lights and their reflections in the waters can be discerned from the
mass of blue of the canvas.

After 1904, when he had already achieved success with his Stockholm views,
Jansson confessed to a friend that he felt absolutely exhausted and had no
more wish to continue with what he had done until then. He stopped
participating in exhibitions for several years and went over to figure
painting. To combat the health issues he had suffered from since childhood, he
became a diligent swimmer and winter bather, often visiting the navy
bathhouse, where he found the new subjects for his paintings. He painted
groups of sunbathing sailors, and young muscular nude men lifting weights or
doing other physical exercises.

Art historians and critics have long avoided the issue of any possible
homoerotic tendencies in this later phase of his art, but later studies (see
Brummer 1999) have established that Jansson was in all probability homosexual
and appears to have had a relationship with at least one of his models. His
brother, Adrian Jansson, who was himself homosexual and survived Eugène by
many years, burnt all his letters and many other papers, possibly to avoid
scandal (homosexuality was illegal in Sweden until 1944).[1]